Categories and News Departments

Have you seen the WordPress.com front page lately? Everyone gets to see the updated design but English readers get a special treat: News Departments. Learn how we decide which posts to feature and how you can get your link and your pretty face on the front page.

The links on the old front page are based on our blog popularity rankings, which you can browse in dozens of languages at Blogs of the Day. Using the same system to rank the posts found in certain categories, we now keep lists of the hottest posts in these departments:

Business

Cars

Entertainment

Family

Health

Politics

Religion

Science

Sports

Technology

Travel

Video

World

Honestly, the lists are still quite weak because although many of you write about these topics, you probably have your own system of categories. For now, we haphazardly grab posts from related categories to try to fill out the lists. That’s why you can see posts in the Sports department that didn’t get posted in the Sports category, for example. We may phase out this logic when more bloggers post directly into these departments.

…unless you want to be excluded from the News Departments. We aren’t about to censor what you publish but we will decide what not to feature on the front page. If you do want to be excluded, please just ask us. It’s no problem.

Lots of people have posted screenshots of the front page and their traffic graphs the first time they see themselves featured. That’s a nice trophy but the best part about being on the front page is that you can attract even more readers who might be interested in your blog. All they will see is your avatar and your post title. Before you upload a new avatar or write a post title, consider you audience and what will attract them.

We have plans to do a lot more than just prettying up the English front page. Other languages will follow. New departments may appear. A lot of work has already gone into the construction of a new place where you can browse fresh, hot content in any department you like but we need your help. We need more posts in each department to make it really work. So remember these global categories.

There’s one more thing. Soon we will publish longer lists of posts with excerpts much like BOTD Top Posts. We have been grabbing excerpts from the post content but we would prefer to let you write your own teasers. You will find an Optional Excerpt field below the Content area on the post writing page. We will use up to 40 words or 200 characters from your Optional Excerpt. No formatting or HTML tags will be allowed so just try to attract readers with a sentence or two. If you leave it blank we’ll use the post content instead. Good luck!

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What I really like (aside from being the first to post a comment) is that the top stories are not static. I tried the technology links and each time I returned to the “top posts” there was a new technology story. Now that is cool.

Wouldn’t it be possible to somehow utilize the community to group blog categories into these global categories? For example, a post in the “linux” category would be able to appear under “Technology”. I wouldn’t like to create yet another category and apply it to every single post just because it is a global category, because all my posts fit in Technology anyway.

Thanks for all the useful information on how to get listed on the front page.

Also, I like the fact that the items in the different new categories change because what catches someone elses eye may not be what is of interest to me but than the next item might be the one that does!

I love it that you guys are always finding ways to make yourself better. You spend more time DOING than you spend patting yourself on the back – a rare trait! And it helps us to find the blogs we like, too.

I don’t like the filtering that a static category list automatically causes. For one thing, you’ll cause people to flood those categories, and for another it means that popular topics which simply haven’t occurred to staff will be completely overlooked, no matter how many people are blogging on them.

Sorry to differ here, since the development of WordPress.com has been outstanding, and change and innovation are always good. For all of that, I’m not sure about this approach.

One of the most captivating things about blogs is surely that the best of them really don’t fit conventional news categories. They fill unique niches which aren’t represented in other locations.

In classic new media-speak, blogs represent the ‘long tail’ of information supply. Their feedback across different strands of ideas and opinion is one of the most captivating aspects of the whole blog revolution – typically blogs are interesting exactly because they do cover information in less predictable and more exciting ways. Blog browsing is a cross-category activity and that is one of its key attractions.

The new WP.com entry page and this request to re-tag blogs to fit pre-defined categories is an interesting attempt to classify the huge scope of information here. But in other respects you could also see it as an unhelpful move which tries to fit round and intriguingly faceted pegs (blogs) into square and boring holes (news-style categories).

So I’d like to say thanks for all the other great ideas, but sadly I’m not convinced that this one really is the way to go.

While I am enjoying the cleaner look of the Front Page, I’m afraid I’m in agreement with raincoaster and Roads. With these limited categories, many compelling, dynamic blogs will never make it to the front page. And your categories completely ignore writing and the arts, the two kinds of blogs I pay the most attention to.

I know you are all working hard behind the scenes. And it’s much appreciated. But the great thing about WordPress is that it’s not as mainstream as all the rest of blog world. Let’s pay attention to writing, and the arts, and daring to be different – and keep it that way. I’m happy not to fit the everyday mold.

I would like to second an idea that someone brought up above: the ability to tag your entire blog in this way. I am a single issue blogger (I blog only philosophy), and hence it would be silly to tag everything philosophy. Which brings me to my second point: there is no category for philosophy to fit into (no, philosophy does not fall under religion, that is a common misconception, although the two do overlap on occasion). Also missing is a mathematics / logic category. Perhaps all of these miscelanious categories (which few people blog about) could fall under something like “abstract thought” or “rational inquiry” or “applied reasoning” or something like that, but better sounding.

I’ll second many people here. My entire blog is a music blog, so unless you come up with a way to tag the entire thing, then nothing I write is going to quite fit in here, despite the fact that I often write about news stories within the music and entertainment fields, as well as about the music business itself.

These tags are far too general to be useful to me, as well as most blogs I read on a regular basis. I love the idea though, so it should be easy to tweak the categories and make it work.

I agree with the sum of this thread so far — “great idea and user-focused development as always. Good one WP, but I think that environment and art are two very necessary, relevant and justified categories which appear to have been omitted.”

Here’s my vote added to the many folks above who also want an Arts or Culture department added. If you take a look at the present departments listed above, you will notice that they almost mirror the sections of any Sunday newspaper – but only one section is missing: Arts & Culture! No, we do not want to be dumped into Entertainment! As an artist, I do not like having to categorize myself in Entertainment as I have to do on YouTube…

First, raincoaster and Roads are right, as is this will probably do more harm than the planned good. You’ve got a million blogs on this thing, you have to figure at least 100,000 of us are going to release each post we write into the wild under each and every default category you can think of…

Second, why not have the featured blog in each category on the WP Front Page as you’ve got now, but with a hotlink to… lets say, a list of Ten More — but random.

I also have my doubts about the pre-fab categories. I would like to see the power of the community used more effectively. Perhaps you could list the top 20 most-used non-trivial categories (excluding ones like “other” and perhaps others to be noted by the community), and then the top posts that use them? If there must be a hierarchy, perhaps we could do it communally, too.

Me and my friends blog about dating and relationships and I don’t feel like it fells under the family, sorry. I mean: relationships is broader than family – but of course you can have both. So could we get either relationships or dating?

As many other wrote before, I do not like pre-fab categories. Why, I talk about music and the category I have created is called The Ear, I talk about art (paintings, sculpture, etc.) and the category is named The Eye… You get the trend.

I am pretty new to this, but you guys have created an incredibly easy to use forum. I love this place! I would like to see you put an energy category in, though. It is the single most important domestic issue of our generation, and I am sure it would be attract a lot of commentary.

I trying to make a point,I get all my news from the wire,its all real news just like word press,how ever I dont see a place for African Americans,there is a real void on line for our news,can you make all minority’s feel even more welcome,Thank you guys are great,no really

Hey, what about randomly cycling through all the tags, or at least SOME of them? That way you wouldn’t have such a feedback loop, as everyone tags their posts with those same categories so they don’t get automatically excluded from contention. So sure, have the #1 most popular category on top if you want, maybe #2 and #3 as well, but have the rest be randomly selected.

So it would list top posts in Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Badgers, Aquacize, and Cretaceous. Tomorrow; Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Holistic Living, Camping, and Gravy.